Maria Mitchell

Mitchell grew up on Nantucket in a Quaker household where astronomy was a family trade rather than a mystery. Her father, William, taught school and moonlighted as an amateur astronomer; her mother, Lydia, worked as a town librarian and kept the family in reading material. At eleven Maria was already helping her father rate chronometers for whaling captains, and at twelve she helped him calculate the exact moment of a solar eclipse. She taught herself trigonometry and calculus alongside her schoolwork, briefly ran her own integrated school at seventeen in defiance of the island's segregated ones, and in 1836 took the job that would define her twenties: first librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum, a post with light enough hours to leave her nights free for the roof.

Mitchell used those nights on the Atheneum roof, and on October 1, 1847, swept a small Dollond telescope across the sky and found a comet nobody else had reported. Her father wrote it up for a scientific journal under his own name before she could stop him, and Francesco de Vico in Rome spotted the same comet independently two days later; Mitchell had to assert her own priority to keep the discovery. The King of Denmark sent a gold medal that made her the first American, and the first woman, to win one for astronomy. Matthew Vassar hired her in 1865 as the college's first professor of astronomy, a post from which she ran the observatory, photographed the sun daily from 1873 onward, and sent more students into "Who's Who" than Harvard's own astronomy department managed over the same years.

The professorship paid her eight hundred dollars a year plus room and board for herself and her elderly father; men on the same faculty made two thousand five hundred dollars and paid nothing for housing. Mitchell and a colleague, Alida Avery, petitioned the college president for equal pay in 1870, were refused, and Mitchell kept writing to the trustees until the board voted the following June to raise both salaries to match the men's. The college then began charging the women sixteen dollars a week for the housing that had supposedly offset the gap, quietly taking most of the raise back. She never married, and she spent much of the money she did make supporting her father, who lived with her at Vassar until his death in 1869.

Vassar kept her observatory running and her name on it, and the honors that had been slow to arrive in life came steadily afterward: the National Women's Hall of Fame inducted her in 1994, a lunar crater carries her name, and a Metro-North commuter train out of Manhattan is called the Maria Mitchell Comet. The salary fight she and Avery forced onto the record became one of the earliest documented equal-pay campaigns by American women academics, cited now more often than the comet itself in histories of women in science. Nantucket, where she is buried, still runs the Maria Mitchell Association she helped seed, teaching astronomy from the same island roofs.

Maria Mitchell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Comet C/1847 T1 (Miss Mitchell's Comet) discovery
  Spotted from the Nantucket Atheneum roof with a three-inch Dollond telescope 1847
• Vassar College Observatory building
  Directed it for more than two decades 1865
• Association for the Advancement of Women other
  Co-founder; served as its second president, 1875-1876 1873
• Daily photographic record of sunspots discovery
  Among the first regular photographs of the sun 1873
• Equal-pay petition to the Vassar trustees other
  Forced a salary correction alongside colleague Alida Avery 1870

• 1831 aged ~13 Helps her father calculate the exact moment of a solar eclipse
• 1836 aged ~18 Becomes first librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum
• October 1, 1847 aged 29 Discovers the comet later designated C/1847 T1
• October 6, 1848 aged 30 Receives the King of Denmark's gold medal for the discovery
• 1865 aged ~47 Appointed Vassar College's first professor of astronomy
• May 1870 aged 51 Petitions Vassar for equal pay alongside Alida Avery
• 1873 aged ~55 Begins daily photographs of the sun and co-founds the Association for the Advancement of Women
• 1888 aged ~70 Retires from Vassar College
• June 28, 1889 aged 70 Dies in Lynn, Massachusetts

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. hosted at her Nantucket home
• Sojourner Truth 1797–1883
  Abolitionist and women's rights activist whose Ain't I a Woman? speech became a rallying cry for equality. hosted at her Nantucket home
• Vera Rubin 1928–2016
  Measured galaxy rotation curves that provided the main observational evidence for dark matter. successor in American astronomy
• Annie Jump Cannon 1863–1941
  Developed the stellar spectral classification system still used to categorize stars. successor in American astronomy